Leslie Kritzer's last show at Joe's Pub, Leslie Kritzer Is Patti LuPone at Les Mouches, was extended multiple times and won her a Special Achievement MAC Award. Since that 2006-07 engagement, Kritzer has appeared on Broadway in Legally Blonde (for which she received Actors' Equity's Clarence Derwent Award as most promising female performer) and A Catered Affair (for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award) and garnered an Outer Critics Circle nomination for the off-Broadway musical Rooms. On May 1, Kritzer will be back on the Joe's Pub stage with Beautiful Disaster, her new cabaret that recounts her tumultuous senior year of high school. Performances are scheduled for 9:30 p.m. May 1-3.
Last year, Kritzer costarred on Broadway with Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams and Tom Wopat (her Catered Affair dad) in Sondheim on Sondheim and was then in the world-premiere cast of The Memory Show, a musical about a woman returning home to care for her Alzheimer's-stricken mother, at Barrington Stage Company in the Berkshires. She first received widespread acclaim when, at age 23, she played Fanny Brice in Funny Girl at Paper Mill Playhouse in her home state of New Jersey in 2001. More recently, she was Sally Bowles in Cabaret at Houston's Theatre Under the Stars, Hildy the cabbie in the City Center Encores! production of On the Town and the angel Gabriel in the 2009 NYMF favorite Judas and Me. Kritzer also received a Drama Desk nom for The Great American Trailer Park Musical and has found fans online via her YouTube videos, which include an audition sketch for Saturday Night Live where she portrays Liza Minnelli, Amy Winehouse, Rachel Zoe and Bristol Palin.
A week before Beautiful Disaster's opening, Kritzer spoke with BroadwayWorld about the show's creation and her own personal growth, both as a teenager and as a theater veteran. For tickets to Leslie's show at Joe's Pub, call 212-967-7555 or buy them here.
Have you done any cabarets before this other than Patti LuPone?
I did one, like, 10 years ago when I first moved to the city, but it was only one performance at Ars Nova. I don't even think we called it anything. I just kind of threw it together with a friend, and my now boyfriend was my accompanist. It was very informal, just something to do. I only wanted to do something [again] if it meant something to me. I'm not the kind of person that just does something to do it. That's why I did the Patti LuPone show: The challenge of it, and it was very interesting—the history of the show and the time that it took place in New York—and I was really inspired by my director's passion for her, and I also very much admired her.
Is Beautiful Disaster autobiographical?
Yes.
Is it 100% accurate?
No. I wish they had a word for "autobiographical with liberties taken." I've been compiling pieces of it for a long time, and then I said, I don't consider myself someone who can write this show alone—I really want a collaborator. Randy Blair, who is cowriting with me, kind of has my comic sensibility. He's a friend, and we work really well together. We had been throwing ideas back and forth: Would it be an evening of my impressions, or my original characters, like a Gilda Radner thing? And we kept coming back to the stuff that meant a lot to me, which was where I grew up and where I'm from. But when you're talking about your life, the stories may be interesting but you have to theatricalize them. There are certain things that are way more heightened, and hopefully the audience goes along with it. We use devices in the show that allow for you to go: Okay, this is for theatrical use. There's a lot of truth in it, and then there's a lot of things that are made to entertain.
What's unique about your life story that made it cabaret material?
Well, I am half Puerto Rican, half Jewish, and I grew up in a very affluent town, Livingston, New Jersey, right outside the city. My parents were going through a horrific divorce, and my senior year I was ready to be the lead in the high school play. I certainly wasn't the star of my high school, but it was like, I wanted my due. I had gone through all this crap with my parents' divorce and we had to move out of our house that I grew up in—it was just a mess, an awful, awful divorce. And I thought I was going to get my due by getting the lead in the high school musical, and I didn't get it. It was kind of a slow decline from there. My parents' divorce got worse, and I got worse because of that. I almost failed out of school and started getting involved in things—which I don't want to ruin [for the show]—where I could have gotten into a lot of trouble. It's like a survival story, about how I pulled myself together and all the cast of characters that are around me in high school and that nostalgia that goes along with it. I pulled my life together and wound up getting out of there and graduating from school on time—which could have very easily not gone in that direction, if certain things didn't happen the way they did.
